http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2010/06/betting-at-the-belmont.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/07/luck-be-a-lady.html

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” -Russell Baker

Note: It’s been a long, strange summer, and a few things (an infestation, a new job) derailed plans for regular updates. I did, however, spend the better portion of August taking bets at the Saratoga Race Course. The following is a collection of observations from my seventh summer as a pari-mutuel clerk. For a primer on the bet-takers, see “My Secret Summer Life.” For a primer on the people who place bets, see “My Most Persistent Customer.”

I became a pari-mutuel clerk in 2003, pushed to the racetrack in a sort of last-ditch effort to find a job in a weak economy. I’ve watched the crowds expand and contract in the past seven years, fueled by increasing prosperity, shrinking with the sport’s waning popularity. They reached new lows last year; I blamed high gas prices—and the feeling that our precarious bubble was about to burst. This year, I didn’t know what to expect. There was rain—it came down in thick sheets on and off that first week—and there was blazing heat, but the economy didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind. For the first few weeks of the meet, people were happier than I’ve seen them in a long time. A lot of men were unabashedly forward. “If I was younger, I’d be on you like beans on rice,” one told me, leaning eagerly against my window. He was probably around sixty, with spiky silver hair and a big, white smile. “Oh boy, you know I would,” he continued. “But there’s not enough Viagra in the world!” One afternoon they pumped Dixieland jazz on the loudspeakers. It was heavy on the lazy, staccato trumpet, with a brisk walking bass, and it was infectious. Across the clubhouse, I watched two men in their early sixties, golf shirts tucked into pressed khakis, grin and link arms, skipping drunkenly across the cement. For a week or two, I was happy, too. The tips were pretty good and I was back on familiar ground. Regulars from five years ago greeted me with a slightly skeptical, “You’re back.” “You are, too,” I’d point out, wishing I could add, “At least I’m getting paid for this.”

*    *    *

A blind man bet at my window one afternoon, accompanied by a friend. I imagine a blind person would have to really love something to come to the track—gambling, or the sound of horses’ hooves beating against the turf, or maybe just the idea of a horse race. He was soft-spoken and graceful, and when I handed him his change he ran is fingers over the bills and asked, “Is this…?” “Three fives and a single,” his friend confirmed, and they thanked me and turned around slowly, gathering their bearings to push through the crowd. “Hurry up, buddy!” a man towards the back of the line shouted. He couldn’t have known that the man was blind, but I hate customers who shout—it’s like honking your horn in gridlock, and, similarly, it’ll never make a line move faster. The blind man didn’t come back to my window, but the shouter did, a Southerner with an unnaturally smooth face and a white baseball cap. He bet a lot and seemed to lose every time. I’m starting to believe in karma.

*    *    *

Hundreds of parents bring their children up to the windows every day. They must think it will be some kind of treat: gambling up close. Usually, three or four children will dart off in opposite directions, like some sort of well-choreographed taunt, and the parents will sigh and scream and still place bets for the brats. Children can be extraordinary gamblers. So much of it is faith, and children, the normal, imaginative ones, have no short supply of blind faith. A horse is chosen because it’s the prettiest, or because it has the nicest name, and the odds are nothing but a list of numbers on the side of the page. “Which horse do you want?” a father will snap at his daughter. And he scoffs when she asks for Rainbow Princess. “Sweetheart, that’s sixty to one.” A child doesn’t need to know the odds; children never get bogged down by the numbers. More often than not, Rainbow Princess comes in. And she pays.

It’s all a game, though. I see the harm in gambling but I don’t often see its effects, and most of these parents aren’t hardened addict types. They wear striped polo shirts and drink oversized glasses of lemonade. They’re usually very tan. I remember one woman with four young girls who came up to my window and went through the standard routine: frazzled, sunglasses dangling from her lower lip, she flipped through the program as her daughters shouted out horses at random. “I want the three!” one would yell, jumping up and down, and the woman would sigh and mutter, “I guess we’ll have the three,” holding up a single crumpled bill to accompany each bet. I imagined Mother Ginger sweeping a dozen dancing children under her skirts. As she sorted her stack of tickets, handing one to each girl, she glanced over all of her children and looked at me ruefully. “I just hope,” she said, “that I’m teaching them the right thing.”

*    *    *

I watched a man scratch his balls under thin cotton shorts, unaware, uncaring. He was studying the odds, his mouth hanging open as his fingers moved up and down. He turned to look at me—I was staring openly—and we caught each other’s eyes. It was a rare moment: I prayed he’d go to another teller. I’ll usually take any customer that crosses into my line of sight, but there was something about him that made me hold my breath. A few customers came and went and then he approached, thin shoulders squared, his body filling my whole window. He looked unclean and vaguely unsettling, with a bulbous nose and pockmarked skin. I looked down to avoid his eyes. A thin gold chain sat on a patch of chest hair poking out between Hawaiian lapels. There were a few charms clustered at the end of it, a little collection of gold resting on thick blue-gray hair, but the only one I can remember is a set miniature handcuffs, glistening, menacing. He bet and I handled his sweaty bills gingerly, at arm’s length. He didn’t come back to my window again.

*    *    *

A few weeks into August, the heat was brutal. With heavy, taunting clouds overhead, we took bets as sweat dripped down the backs of our necks and collected behind our knees. The humidity jammed our machines, made customers weary and short-tempered, and led one trainer after another to scratch their horses from the card. It reminded me of a Wednesday three summers ago, when we woke up to temperatures approaching 100 degrees. Track officials met with trainers, jockeys, stewards, and veterinarians early that morning and made an unprecedented call to cancel an entire day of racing. Or a Wednesday the year before, in the beginning of September 2005. Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the south and swept up the Eastern Seaboard and we were left with the last angry bits—a dark, muddy sky and air so thick it was hard to move. They cancelled the first two races and we sat, sweltering and staring at a crowd of no more than a dozen desperate regulars. The storm finally broke around the fifth or sixth race, and we all rushed home in the downpour to watch Anderson Cooper wade through knee-high water in New Orleans.

By Labor Day, people were wrapped up and ready for fall, in jackets and sweaters, green flannel and tan windbreakers. The weather responded in kind. It was too early for an Indian summer, and the temperature hovered just above 60. The sky was a bright greyish white, and it threatened, hanging over the grandstand, but never delivered. The sun peeked out sometime before the ninth race. The crowd was hungover and quiet, curled in on themselves and solemnly choosing their very last bets. Fifty feet away, a jam band played a sleepy, rambling sort of melody, with a steady bass, gentle chords, and a creative but excessive harmonica descant. A small crowd had gathered around the bandstand, swaying and taking pictures of the guitarist, an animated hippie in a purple poncho. Next to the beer seller, not far from my window, a woman stepped apart from a crowd of boisterous men and did a secretive two-step, shuffling with the quick, jumpy footwork of country line dancing. Two brisk turns and she was done, sliding back into small talk with the group as they continued to debate Linda Rice and the season’s training title.

*    *    *

Sometimes this place smells terrible, like burning cooking grease, cigars, cheap spilled beer, and a thousand men in tank tops, sweating profusely. But sometimes it smells like all the best parts of a carnival, and when you walk out of the park in that final week of the meet, when the sun hangs lower and lower every day, it smells like the very end of summer—like grass, leaves, and wood smoke. Summer is a season of nostalgia—will it ever be what it was when we were children?—and Labor Day is an echo of all that. I always find myself looking back with regret, marveling at wasted afternoons I could have spent sitting in the sun. In Saratoga, those last few days feel incredibly final. Horses are nudged onto long metal trucks, and they poke their noses out of thin slats as they’re shipped out of town, out of state, back down to Kentucky where the bluegrass never sees more than an inch of frost. By the weekend the summer estates have been boarded up, winter-proofed, and they sit waiting. Tourists clear out and college students return; restaurant owners take overdue vacations. It’s a perfectly ordinary transition in a resort town, from seasonal life to real life, but it feels a little bit new every year.

In college, returning to the track for another summer was expected—and welcome, a steady job when I could really use the money. But for the past few years, I’ve walked away with a question hanging: will this season be my last? Two years ago, I was off to work in Scotland; last year, to start a new life in New York. Now that my New York life is something established and semi-permanent, and I can’t help but look back on my seven racetrack summers with that same mix of regret and nostalgia. Working there is uncomplicated; social interactions are boiled down to a wink, a smile, and a monetary transaction. There’s an ease and a nonchalance that works its way into everything: it’s only money, after all. It’s a life that can’t exist without long, hot afternoons, or without the thrill of a close horse race. In some ways, it’s a fantasy world—one that’s dirty, sweaty, and loud, where the paint is chipping and our baser instincts are on full display—but it’s fantastical nonetheless. I’m not sad to see the season end, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss it.

“In betting on races, however, there are two elements that are never lacking: hope against hope and an incomplete recollection of the lessons of the past.”   -E. V. Lucas, Visibility Good

Note: For a little perspective, see my post on the Belmont Stakes from a year ago, “Belmont 2008.” Original titles, I know.

I didn’t work the Preakness Stakes in 2006, but I watched it on television. The previous three years had seen highly promising horses win two of the three legs of the Triple Crown, and we watched Funny Cide, Afleet Alex, and Smarty Jones slip from the public’s favor the second they were nosed out of a sweep. In 2006, Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro seemed to be getting as much hype as these three hopefuls combined. NBC devoted most of their pre-Preakness coverage to the horse, following him from the stable to the paddock to the post. I still remember that moment, a few furlongs into the race, when everyone realized that something had gone wrong. Barbaro twisted and stuttered—Edgar Prado was quickly and skillfully pulling him up—and he half limped, half sprinted to the side as the cameramen grudgingly tracked the rest of the race. Bernadini won easily, and everyone turned back to Barbaro, surrounded by trainers and doctors, looking so much smaller without his saddle as he gingerly raised the right hind leg on which he could no longer stand. I’ve watched it again recently, and it’s still heartbreaking. The bigger story is a compelling one—the long, costly battle to repair and rehabilitate Barbaro after an injury that is normally met with swift euthanasia, his eventual death and the resulting scrutiny into unsafe breeding and racing conditions—but that moment on the track remains one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Seven years ago, I started working in an industry whose facets were in varying stages of decline. Horses were growing bigger and running faster every year, but they were breaking down more often, and a single bad step increasingly meant an end to a racing career, or to a life. In grandstands across the country, turnout was plummeting, and on the other side of the windows, state and federal officials were quashing the corrupt practices that had become emblematic of pari-mutuel betting. Customers and fellow tellers were constantly telling me that things just weren’t the same these days; they could never seem to agree on exactly when things were better, but the glory days were, without a doubt, behind us. I worked over at Belmont a few weeks ago, on a sunny Memorial Day, and they put me up in the far end of the Clubhouse with just half a dozen other tellers. We were in a big, air-conditioned room with twenty or thirty rows of desks and chairs facing two walls of televisions tuned to every major track in the country. The crowd was decidedly older: my youngest customer that day was probably in his early sixties. The teller next to me had worked Belmont weekends for the past two decades, and he’d spent many Saturdays stuck in this forgotten corner of the track. “These people are here every single day,” he said, scanning the crowd grimly. “And I don’t know who’s going to fill these seats when they’re gone.”

I came back to Belmont two weekends later for the final leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes. I was spared a sleepy afternoon upstairs when they assigned me a window out in the park, where people had arrived at eight in the morning to claim picnic tables, where shirts and shoes were apparently optional, and where $8 beers didn’t seem to slow anyone down. It was one of the more brutal major race days I can remember. Attendance was way, way down: nearly fifty percent fewer people than last year, when a hundred thousand showed up to see if Big Brown would be the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978. But I think the economy kept people out of the stands, where seats and boxes can cost hundreds, and pushed them into the park, where you can bring your own food and smuggle in your own liquor. My customers were rowdy novices and the tips were paltry, though one man, upon winning a few hundred, handed me a ten and shouted, “You! You’re worth the price of admission!”

Barbaro cast a dark shadow over the 2006 racing season, and last year saw Eight Belles break two legs moments after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby. She was euthanized right on the track minutes later. Peter J. Boyer wrote about her trainer, Larry Jones, in The New Yorker last month. Much of the article hovers in a weird space between an in-depth profile of Jones and an investigative report on the dangers of overmedicating and over-breeding thoroughbreds, but it never really goes far enough in either direction. There are powerful moments in the piece, though, like when Boyer describes the final moments of the Derby, when Eight Belles is put down before anyone consults Jones:

When he got next to his horse, and touched her, moving her legs, he could see that the decision made on the track had been the right one. Eight Belles had suffered compound fractures to both of her front ankles. “She had no chance,’” he says now. “As soon as I looked, and moved her legs just a little bit, there was no way you’re gonna save this horse. You’ve gotta have at least three legs to stand on, and she didn’t have ‘em. She just didn’t have ‘em.”

This year we haven’t seen such tragedies, with some trainers erring on the side of caution and keeping favorites out of big races rather than risking horses’ health for high profile wins. Last year, when PETA got vocal and Congress talked about stepping in, I was sure that by this year the racing world would be a very different one: highly regulated, continually criticized, and possibly nearing an actual end. But Congress never did get around to a serious probe, and rightly so—I’d much rather have them grill auto and banking executives than drug-loving horse trainers like Rick Dutrow. But states have spent the past year putting some regulations in place, banning steroids and some medications, and replacing natural surfaces with gentler artificial tracks.

But it seems to me that nothing the government does, short of extreme action, will really change the sport. The pressure won’t come from the fans, many of whom care more about trifecta payouts than they do about the long-term welfare of horses. Nor will it come from animal rights groups: some equate thoroughbred racing with dog and cock fighting, and their extreme rhetoric and lack of in-depth understanding only hurts their cause with racing professionals. Change must come from within. In my post about last year’s Belmont Stakes, I quoted Sid Gustafson, a novelist and horse veterinarian who contributes to The Rail, the New York Times’ Triple Crown blog. This year, in an article called “Horse Safety is Up to Us All,” he writes about the medications and techniques used to dull horses’ senses and push through injuries. He calls for the professional racing community to voluntarily end these practices, writing with characteristic gentleness. “…it is all of us who must contribute to make racing safer, and to improve the competitive ethic and our relationship with the horse. In time, horsemanship will once again by and large replace medication, and horse behavior will once again be appropriately considered.”

Things feel different this year. In our everyday lives, we’re more cautious, buying next to nothing, choosing essentials slowly and carefully, opting for products that are built to last. For years, horses have been bred based on the market, because a horse descended from champions can often make more as a sire than he could winning races. Today’s thoroughbreds are inbred and subsequently shakier for it: as Boyer points out in The New Yorker, every runner in the 2008 Kentucky Derby was related to a single horse—Native Dancer, who had notoriously bad ankles. I’m not prepared to draw any foolish metaphors about an inherently weak horse with a sterling pedigree and, say, any of the trickery that fueled the financial services industry until the fall of 2008, but I think there might be a parallel in there somewhere. Most people in the racing industry are united by one thing: a love of horses. Ten years ago, I couldn’t have cared less about them; now, I’m in tears watching a horse break down. Horses are not simply an investment, or a number to bet on. I imagine most people have always known this, but with the tragedies of recent years, they now seem to be acting on it. Between that and the economy, the racetrack feels like a very sober place these days. But if that’s what it takes to save the industry, then I’m all for it.

“It’s the people’s race! It’s the people’s party! It’s the people’s event, which means a lot to the city and the state. I think the Preakness will be here in 2010 and for many years to follow.” -Maryland Jockey Club president Tom Chuckas Jr., in the Washington Post

There’s always something a little disappointing about the second installment of a trilogy. The first part is usually fresh and full of possibilities, all exposition and introductions and hobbits in the Shire. The final part, of course, is climax and conclusion, where the guy gets the girl and most of your favorite characters make it out of the battle unscathed. The middle is full of necessary evils: slow plot and character development, red herrings, and unsatisfying cliffhangers. It’s easy to argue against this on a case by case basis–I’m no “Star Wars” fan, but I enjoyed “The Empire Strikes Back” a hell of a lot more than the others—but as a general format, it often holds true, and the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, is no exception. It lacks the glamor and Southern charm of the Kentucky Derby, and it has none of the Belmont Stakes’ grim finality, something you’d expect from a longer-than-usual race held just outside of Queens. Despite its storied history and important role in the racing calendar, the Preakness seems to be more famous for drunken (and dangerous) revelry than for anything that has to do with horses.

In recent years, the Preakness infield has played host to 60,000 party-goers, armed with coolers, funnels, and inflatable beer pong tables. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching frat boys run on top of a row of porta-potties while people throw bottles and cans at them, make sure you check out the Running of the Urinals. A quick scan of the YouTube comments reveals that lots of people find this funny; Maryland racing officials didn’t. By many accounts, infield spectators were more likely to be hit with a bottle of beer or sexually assaulted than they were to see a horse race, and last year, 6 people were arrested and another 120 were ejected from the park. This pales to the behavior of one drunken spectator a decade ago, who jumped the rail in the middle of a race and tried to punch a horse as they came down the stretch. A few months ago, the Maryland Jockey Club announced a ban on all beverages, soda and water included, and they were met with mixed responses. “This is our Mardi Gras,” one man told the Baltimore Sun. “Sometimes it gets out of hand, but it’s ours.” Other fans weren’t so torn up: “It will take a couple years for the word of mouth to get out and say, ‘Look, man, it’s not as bad as it used to be,’” another man told the same reporter. “I think you’ll start getting more people coming back.” The same man also helpfully pointed out that at $3.50 a beer, you’d be less likely to chuck it across a crowd.

I’ve taken bets from all types. In September, I worked a Saturday in the restaurant bay at Belmont and punched a few thousand-dollar tickets for an impeccably dressed Bobby Flay. A few weeks later, I took the E train back out to Jamaica to work the simulcast of the Breeder’s Cup, and they put me in a bay down by the track where recent immigrants—Russians, Haitians, Dominicans, Pakistanis—placed dollar bets as they leered at me. One man asked for my hand in marriage and muttered something in Russian directly to my chest; a fellow teller later told me that some women refer to the area as the “bay of pigs.” There are three things that the majority of my customers have in common: their gender (male), their desire to put money on a horse race (strong), and their love of drinking (deep, great, unwavering). Frat boys from Long Island with overpriced cups of Budweiser; linen-suited horse owners with tall, well-garnished cocktails. At the Belmont Stakes a few years ago, four guys dressed in identical Uncle Sam costumes accidentally spilled the contents of an over-sized lemonade glass all over me and my machine. From the smell of it, it was three parts whiskey, one part lemonade.

For all the whining, anger, and threats of boycott over the alcohol ban, booze wasn’t particularly hard to find on Saturday. Black Eyed Susan sellers walked around with trays of drinks strapped around their necks, popcorn seller-style, hawking orange juice based-cocktails that contain both vodka and rum. In an effort to capitalize on the Preakness’s long history of binge drinking, Pimlico offered a “Breakfast Special”: $1 beers from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. I looked up from counting my money just after 9:30 and saw a customer at the next window over flipping through the program with a half-empty glass of beer in his hand. “Who do you like, honey?” he asked the teller next to me, his voice a little too loud. Just a few minutes earlier my neighbor had complained about walking into the park and seeing dozens of drunks passed out on the grass. “Don’t walk alone around here,” she told me. “This is the hood.” She lives in Crown Heights, far from the safest neighborhood in Brooklyn, so I took her warning seriously. “Let me see,” she said, taking the program from the customer and scanning the odds. He took a long swig of beer, leaned over the counter, and winked at me. I knew then that we were in for a long day.

I’ve been an employee of the New York Racing Association for the past seven years. Last Saturday marked my first time working at a track outside of New York state, and it was stressful at first, learning a brand new (shoddy, antiquated) system on one of the biggest racing days of the year. But my customers—and their bets—were ordinary enough. I missed a few ethnic groups that make up my core customer base at Saratoga and Belmont—Italians and Mexicans, mostly (Catholics love me)—but it was a pretty typical crowd for a big race day: lots of tourists in golf clothes and big flowery hats, blushing and tentative early on, asking us to explain even the simplest bets, and giddy and drunk towards the end, betting way more than they cash and occasionally realizing that it’s polite to tip your teller. And it was strange: the recession has entered everyone’s vernacular, and even though I feel it acutely every day, as a Manhattan editor and as a parimutuel, I wasn’t expecting to think of it so much at the Preakness. But I did, because it just felt like people were betting beyond their means. I took in so much cash, and I handed so little of it back. And the numbers proved my gut instinct: attendance was cut by about a third, from 112,222 to 77,850, but the handle—the amount of money the track takes in bets—was up by about $13 million. The logical explanation: the tens of thousands that usually spend all day throwing beer cans instead of betting were absent. The emotional response: people are getting a little bit desperate, and betting a whole lot more.

It might be the economy, or it might be a natural progression of things: on any day but Preakness day, Pimlico Racecourse is failing. ESPN shows footage of an average afternoon at the track, which has drastically cut its season to twenty racing days in the spring. You can see it in the physical structures of the track itself, with its dingy grandstand and crumbling facilities. There’s been talk of moving the Preakness to Maryland’s other track, Laurel Park, or of moving it out of Maryland all together. In March, the owner of both tracks, Magna Entertainment, filed for bankruptcy, and many of the state’s officials—including the governor—were quick to defend Laurel and Pimlico and promise future Maryland Preaknesses. The ban on alcohol was seen by some as a particuarly low blow to the few remaining loyal fans, and the resulting re-branding of the event as “The People’s Race” didn’t really help the situation.

Rachel Alexandra, though, gave the crowd a collective boost. The first filly to win the race in 85 years, she was a popular bet, but far from a sure thing. An oafish man in striped button down came to my window and put down $20 on “the lady.” “The 13 in the 12th race?” I asked to confirm, and he nodded. “Yeah, I’m rootin’ for the lady.” I looked him up and down and said primly, “That’s a very positive feminist statement,” and started to count out his change. There was a long silence as I placed twenties on my machine, and then he muttered, “I mean, it’s not that feminist.” He sounded a little horrified. Unlike some female commentators, I don’t see much point in claiming Rachel Alexandra’s victory as one for all womankind; if she was ridden by a female jockey, maybe female-owned and trained, then we’d have some gender equality to celebrate. But it was a great race—exhillarating, down to the wire, the kind of race that you go to a track to see, to hold your breath as you grip your tickets. I cashed hundreds of tickets after that race, people flushed and beaming, seasoned gamblers and novice tourists alike. For many, racing is about the horses. For me and my fellow tellers, it’s about the people. Pimlico would be well-served to remember this when—if—they run the next People’s Race.

“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”  -Aaron Levenstein

I’ve spent the past eight months trying my best to be useful—and trying to get paid for it. I arrived in New York City in October, a few weeks after the fall of the first big, public dominos of the financial crisis. Thousands were being laid off every day, and I was looking for work. I got my foot in a very specific door—web editorial work—and I learned that I’m actually a methodical, detail-oriented person, capable of handling large amounts of material and performing repetitive tasks without gouging my eyes out. I’ve gotten gigs up and down the length of Manhattan: big media corporations, small magazines, dictionaries, an investigative journalism outlet. It’s fun wearing my fancy pants one day and jeans the next, but it gets confusing, and it’s hard to feel wholly committed to anything. I know people who’ve done this for years; I’m already completely exhausted.  

Still, there’s something deeply satisfying about slogging through these enormous amounts of material. I spent months sorting through and fixing up 4,000 covers; I sliced and scanned old books of variant spellings and painstakingly compared “majors general” with “major generals.” I never knew how much I loved charts and lists and the act of quantifying qualitative information. I’d drawn pretty clear lines between the humanities and everything else: the former is all good books and beautiful music, and the latter is Microsoft Excel, or worse, PowerPoint—that Phantom Tollbooth boundary between Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. Any attempt to mix the two would be like the Pritchard scale of the “greatness” of poetry, or ranking art. But the web, at least the best, most innovative bits, pretty much destroys what was probably a false distinction to begin with.

In late December, when Harper’s Magazine called with 12,000-plus statistics and an ambitious web project, I couldn’t say no. March 2009 marked the 25th anniversary of the Harper’s Index, a monthly collection of 40 or so carefully fact-checked stats—to get an idea, check out the index from January of this year, an extra-long one to celebrate the end of the Bush presidency. The magazine’s editor, Roger Hodge, calls the index “a statistical poem.” The webmaster, Paul Ford, wanted to use the web to turn it into something else entirely.

The result was the searchable index, which launched a few months ago. Paul did all the legit technical work; I did the slogging I’m quickly becoming known for. I pulled all 12,000 stats from scanned pages, laid them out in a big spreadsheet, matched them up with their sources, proofread them, and marked the truly awesome ones–“Average number of peas in a pod: 8”—with a little X in the “AWESOME” column. The tool Paul built is clean, simple, and a whole lot of fun, and the taxonomy we created to sort and tag the stats kind of sucks you in—you find yourself randomly clicking things, heading from “cats” to “sexual assault” to “Mikhail Gorbachev” to “shlock” in minutes. And I finished the project with a strangely comprehensive understanding of the index, and at least a vague memory of every single stat in it. I’m hoping it will come in handy at parties.

I have friends—scientists, economists, finance types—who use numbers to look at the world every day; for me, it’s uncharted territory, and I find it both fascinating and unsettling. A few days into the index project, I created a little document called “facts to remember,” a collection of atrocities and injustices that seem so much more troubling when they’re expressed in plain numbers. One of the earliest is this one, from 1988: 

It’s easy to lie—or at the very least, mislead—with statistics, but still, there’s something starkly depressing about this fact. Sure, you can’t just stick homeless people in vacant condos, but imagining thousands on the street and thousands of empty rooms is frustrating and sad. In 1991, “Percentage of male college students who say that ‘some women look as though they’re just asking to be raped’: 84″ Or in 2005, “Minutes that NBC and CBS spent covering the Darfur genocide last year: 8″ A lot of the stats are confirmations of gut feelings I’d already had, but some are startling revelations. I take each one with a grain or two of salt, because I know that statistics are only an expression of a few numbers, not a fully accurate representation of a bigger story. But it’s that act of quantifying qualitative information, something I’d always shied away from, that strikes me the most. Ideas can be distilled into a set of numbers. It’s powerful: a little exciting, but still a little frightening. After all, numbers are pretty easy to manipulate.

Nonetheless, I’m still well aware of the fact that sometimes, numbers just don’t cut it. Earlier this year, “This American Life” re-aired their early “Numbers” episode, a collection of stories in which life just can’t be quantified: a couple takes quarterly report-style stock of their relationship; artists take polls to figure out exactly what people want to see in a painting. I’ve recently been helping some investigative journalists with a big foreclosure project, pulling original deeds on hundreds of foreclosed homes in Seattle and its suburbs. A search for a property might yield ten or fifteen results: a few owners, a few foreclosures, a bank’s intervention, a house changing hands in a divorce or a death. I’ll see half a dozen foreclosure notices, and I can’t help but wish I had more than just a list. Why did they take out such an enormous mortgage in the first place? Were they trying to make the payments? Did someone lose a job, or get sick? Or were they simply irresponsible? These days, hundreds of thousands of homes are foreclosed upon each month, but no number—the big statistics or the property data—tells me what I really want to know about the collapse of the housing market.

I don’t know if people who work with statistical data every day get bogged down by these questions. And I’m not sure why the powerful simplicity of some index stats draws me in, while just as often, the lack of human information leaves me disappointed. Are tragedies best illustrated—and more strongly felt and understood—with death tolls and casualty rates, or with individual stories of suffering? I think in many cases, it depends on both the person and the situation. And perhaps more importantly, on the telling itself.

“Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.” -Barack Obama, after winning the Iowa Caucus

Four years ago, I cast my very first presidential ballot. I was 19, living in one blue state and voting absentee in another, and there was something vaguely unsatisfying about putting a little X next to John Kerry’s name. I was voting against George W. Bush—who terrified me, a memory that’s hard to reconcile with our 2008 keep-as-low-a-profile-as-possible president. Bush’s first term marked a strange time to grow into a thinking member of the electorate: September 11th, the hyper-patriotism that followed, the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the invasion of Baghdad, the Patriot Act, and Abu Ghraib. I didn’t think we could afford four more years, but a slim majority of the American public disagreed with me. I cried on election night, and when I woke up the next morning, I wrote an editorial for the campus newspaper that basically endorsed resigned disillusionment. There was hope and there was fear, and the latter had prevailed. Reading over the piece now, this passage stands out:

This presidency may define our lives. The majority of us will graduate from college at some point during Bush’s second term, and his policies will determine what kind of lives we lead: our job opportunities, our level of safety and our civil liberties, at the very least. If every generation is defined by its most trying times, wars and social upheaval and economic extremes, then will we be defined as the generation that comes of age as Bush reorders the world?

And where are we now? Our economic situation is dire, but the blame lies on both sides of the partisan divide—and all across the private sector. It’s still a terrifying time to start a career. During my unpaid internship this past spring, I fretted over rising food prices and the stagnant job market. Right now, freelancing for a major media corporation, I know it’s only a matter of time before budgets dry up. I doubt that a President Kerry would have worked miracles. But the slow, systemic Bush changes—like the quiet overhaul of the DOJ—will be hard to reverse. Addressing the credit crisis in July, Bush famously uttered, “Wall Street got drunk.” The same could be said of a good portion of the American public, swallowing everything the administration offered. It will take some time to sober up, but I have faith that we can fix things. It’s all I have, really.

I guess it was impossible to give up on hope completely. There’s always been a little bit of it in my writing, the (hopefully) just-this-side-of-cheesy optimism that I use to tie up loose ends and leave the reader with a positive message. But I really do take a lot of it to heart. I believe that everyone—save psychopaths and Dick Cheney—has an inherent capacity for good. It’s easy to be cynical, though I guess it’s not so hard to be hopeful. It’s just more disappointing when things don’t work out. I waver from time to time—those periods of disillusionment—but for five years, my closest friend kept me on track. Alice was an activist and a pragmatic optimist; she embodied hope and campaigned for systemic change, even as she kept an eye on the broader world and the realities that govern it. She kept my spirits up during college, and, as we spread across the globe in the months following graduation, I did my best to take her hope with me.

Last fall I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the British press were too busy pointing fingers in the Madeleine McCann case to pay a whole lot of attention to the U.S. presidential primaries. But just days after I flew home, I sat up watching the Iowa returns. My memory of Barack Obama’s national debut at the 2004 convention was sketchy, so when networks called the caucus in his favor and he took the stage, his speech was something of a revelation. The lofty rhetoric that would be blamed for a poor showing in Pennsylvania had me sold in a matter of minutes. For the first time in my entire life, I had found a candidate I could be passionate about and proud of; a candidate I’d be happy to vote for, not in spite of. The primaries feel like a lifetime ago, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling, sitting on a couch in my parents’ living room on a chilly January night. Before the spectacle that has marked this election season—Joe the Plumber, Jeremiah Wright, Sarah Palin, the implosion of the MSNBC news team—there was a pragmatic optimist that I could stand behind. This was the candidate we deserved. I had no doubts the night of the Iowa Caucus: hope would prevail.

Ten days before the election, This American Life aired an episode called “Ground Game” about both parties’ efforts in Pennsylvania. The stories were pretty depressing across the board—I was left wondering why we care so much about the opinions of working class white men—but the last segment was an “air check” from Steve Corbett’s talk radio show on WILK in Scranton. Corbett went from Hillary to McCain, and he had spent the majority of this particular show talking about Bill Ayers. TAL played an exchange with one caller, a sweet, soft-spoken guy who said that whatever you think about Barack Obama—or Sarah Palin—it’s what you feel that matters. He said it with such simple eloquence that I’d recommend listening to the clip yourself. Corbett responded with this:

People will see what they want to see, and very often, we see very the same set of circumstances in very different ways. But you’re doing exactly what you should do; I just wish more people would follow your example. Thank you. And that’s exactly right. He’s trying to figure it out. And he knows, as we all know, if we think it through, it’s risky. It’s risky to go into that voting booth and believe in somebody.

There are two ways to view Corbett’s response. One sees wordplay—voting for Barack Obama is risky—and the other sees truth in that final sentence. It’s hard to put your faith in a political candidate. It’s hard to care so deeply about the outcome of an election. I chose the latter interpretation, and ten days later, I walked into a voting both and kissed Barack Obama’s name three times before pulling the lever. Twelve hours later, I was standing in the middle of a screaming crowd in Times Square. Once again, I was crying on election night. It was another election of hope or fear, and, finally, America had made the right choice.

The next day was mild and overcast in New York. Everyone seemed sluggish, and I wasn’t happy anymore. I think for so many of us, who’ve put so much faith in the outcome of this election, there was a rapid letdown when the adrenaline wore off. But I also couldn’t get a friend’s words from the night before out of my mind: “Don’t you wish Alice could have seen this?” I did. If anyone should have seen the election results, it was her. But she was killed four months ago, hit by a truck while biking to work in Washington, D.C. There’s a tragic injustice in the fact that Madelyn Dunham died the day before the grandson she raised was elected president. And there’s a tragic injustice in the fact that Alice, the one person who did more than anyone else I know to enact change and stay positive, died before Bush left the White House, before Barack Obama became president elect.

The joy of November 4th has already given way to skepticism and criticism—how dare Barack Obama employ lobbyists on his transition team?—so I’m finding it best to put aside the negativity for now. We were hopeful three weeks ago; can’t we be hopeful now? During her funeral, Alice’s mother expressed a wish that we’d all try to lead our lives with Alice’s spirit and ideals in our hearts. Alice had “the courage to remake the world as it should be”; she simply wasn’t given enough of an opportunity. It’s my sincere hope that Barack Obama’s election marks the beginning of the remaking—or, perhaps, reordering—of the world. Doing good is imperative: we can enact the changes that Alice would have been proud of. We’ve collectively taken the first step; for her sake, I hope we can take millions more.

“Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.” -Gloria Steinem

Note: More apologies for another month-long delay. The racing season proved to be more taxing than usual. One day a man said to me, “If you’re single, then I love you.” This story, which I wrote a year ago, is in the same vein.

Two years ago, I had a regular window in the Lower Clubhouse. A good portion of my customers were serious career gamblers: big bets, big tips, and a whole lot of leering. I’m good with casual flirting, good with being called sweetheart and baby doll and brushing off little flashes of male perversion. “I haven’t won a single race in two days,” a man once told me, looking desperate and a little bit angry. “Take off your top for me.” His friend just laughed. “Don’t mind him, he’s drunk.”

Most of our customers are men and I’d say two thirds of the tellers are women. You hear plenty of horror stories about men taking things too far: waiting for tellers after work, threatening to follow them home, the sorts of things I imagine strippers face regularly. But we’re not so overtly sexual; some of us aren’t sexual at all. Customers ask us out but I don’t know anyone who follows through.

But two years ago in the Lower Clubhouse, I had a suitor. To protect his identity, I’ll call him Laszlo. I worked this window every day, and Laszlo was a regular customer. He is from Eastern Europe, and though he’s nearly fluent, our conversations were stunted: I had to reorder his words in my head, and he blinked at my colloquialisms. He’s relatively nice looking – incredibly European, with a flat, open face and a somewhat weak chin. And he has fluffy, dark grey hair. I’ve never asked, but I’m guessing he’s at least fifty-five.

Laszlo is an expert gambler. He’ll pick horses with long odds and win a few grand on a single bet. He’s the rare customer that understands horses’ physiology: he can spend a few minutes looking at a horse’s legs and then slap down a $200 bet with confidence. He wins, but more importantly, he tips. He gave me hundreds that summer, including the ultimate tip, a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

A lot of customers casually ask me out, so casually that it’s best to laugh and lower my eyes and avoid words like “yes” and “no.” But Laszlo was serious and straightforward, and he asked me out literally every day. “Would you like to go for dinner sometimes?” “How old you are?” “Here is my card: you call me soon.” I was twenty at the time. But Laszlo was very charming and incredibly nice, and I didn’t see the harm in having a meal with him. So one Monday towards the end of the meet I said, “You know what, why don’t we go out tomorrow?” His face lit up but before he could say anything, I continued. “Tomorrow’s my day off, we could go to lunch.” His face literally collapsed. “Okay, lunch,” he agreed, sounding resigned. “You give me call in the morning.”

So I called the next morning. “You meet me at the backstretch,” he said. I paused. The backstretch is the back of the track, where the trainers work out the horses. There was something weirdly unsavory about the whole thing. “How about somewhere in town?” I asked, my apprehension growing. “I know nowhere in town,” he told me resolutely. “Can we please meet in town?” I asked again, suddenly terrified by the prospect of meeting him anywhere. “We go in my car,” he suggested. “Get out of the city. It will be good for you.”

I hung up, baffled and nervous. We had arranged a place and a time, but when I walked into the kitchen to explain this to my mother, I realized how awful the entire situation was. Get out of the city. It will be good for you. It was probably just a matter of awkward translation but it was also fairly creepy. I called him back half an hour later. “Look, I don’t know if this is such a good idea today…” I began. He didn’t even try to argue; he cut me off, his tone sharp. “Okay. Bye.” And he promptly hung up the phone.

But he came back to my window the next day, undeterred. “When we go out?” I was deliberately vague. He kept coming back. A few days later he said, “I like you, you know. I like your shape. You should just fix your hair.” I was outraged: he had the audacity to insult me while complimenting my “shape,” which he could only really see from the waist up. I finally told him that it wasn’t going to happen. He came back to cash one last ticket, a few thousand dollars, and as I handed him the stack of bills he asked, “How much of my money you want today?” “It’s your money,” I told him, eyes narrowed. He didn’t come back again.

I worked on the opposite side of the park the following year. I saw him once, from afar. The entire thing became an anecdote that showed exactly what sort of attention young female mutuel clerks receive. But one day about a week into this year’s meet, I saw a familiar profile twenty feet from my window. Fluffy, dark grey hair, well-cut olive khakis. Laszlo looked exactly the same. I leaned over and whispered to the girl next to me, “See that guy over there? He used to ask me out all the time.” She nodded sympathetically. A week later, I looked up and he was next on line at my window, grinning, a winning ticket in his hand.

He wasted no time. “How have you been?” he asked me, his accent just as thick. As I counted out his money, he leaned forward. “How old you are now?” I told him and he didn’t miss a beat. “If you would be liking to go out sometime…Do you have my number still?” He dropped a ten-dollar bill on my machine. I slipped it into my pocket, and round two of our courtship began.

It’s only two years, but things look very different at twenty-two. I might be carded at the door but we can still go out for drinks. He may be as old as my father but I’m a college graduate, something like an adult, or closer to it. And just like last time, because I apparently never learn my lesson, I thought it could be all right. We would meet somewhere, have a drink and talk – about what remained to be seen – and a little voice in the back of my mind tried to help me imagine Laslzo in a sexual way – as a hook up, as a sugar daddy. I didn’t want Laszlo as any of those things, but I knew one drink probably couldn’t hurt.

I asked my friend Brooks for advice and he half-jokingly wrote: “I’d say what you should do is drag this out in a low-key stagnant way for as much of the summer as possible. Keep him guessing? Isn’t that how girls are supposed to deal with guys, anyway?” That seemed perfectly reasonable. As I continued to drag things out, Laszlo started winning every single race. The tipping increased astronomically. One day I went home with more than two hundred dollars in my pocket. He’d tell me to keep fifty, keep seventy, and I kept saying, “Are you sure?” I wanted him to know that I wasn’t coercing anything out of him. I probably made five hundred dollars off of him in a little under a week.

He was also making odd little comments here and there. A few offers to visit him at his home in Florida. Maybe we could go down to Kentucky together? I was sick for a little while and he came in a few days later sneezing. “You’re sick too?” I asked. “ I did not get it from kissing you,” he said. Nervous laughter, and I stepped off to the side, grateful that I had to count my money. It also became clear that we didn’t have anything in common. He asked me what I was reading and I showed him the cover. “I don’t read,” he said to me, almost proudly.

The tips kept coming and there was a weight growing in the pit of my stomach. It was the idea that I’d have to pay him back for all of this, and I started to understand what it’s like to whore yourself out. A lot of female mutuels use their sexuality at work, tossing hair and flirting to endear themselves to customers. But when it comes right down to it, there really isn’t any follow through. Unless you go and blurt out something ridiculous – like a promise to follow through.

“You are running out of time,” he told me. “I leave after the big race.” The big race is the Travers Stakes, and I resolved to do something about the situation before that weekend. I don’t know what came over me, but the words just slipped out: “How about tomorrow? We could go out tomorrow.” He looked ecstatic and handed me a twenty. He told me that we could have dinner at the “shopping center.” Plans could potentially include a movie. We would certainly do a lot of walking and talking.

First of all, the shopping center? He wanted to take me to the mall? Second of all, a movie? What are we, fourteen? How are we supposed to have conversations – he kept referencing our potential conversations – in a movie theater? But more importantly, I don’t have a car, and it would be tricky to walk to the mall. We were venturing back into dangerous territory: that in which he takes me somewhere in his car. Out of the city. It’ll be good for me.

I panicked all night. The next morning I mentioned it to my mother. “You need to tell him that you’ll meet him in town,” she said. I told her how hard it is to actually explain things to him, the way his eyes scrunch up when he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. “And,” she added, “you need to tell him that you’re just going as friends.” “He certainly won’t understand that,” I said, feeling like this was all just as bad, if not worse, than the first time around.

It was cold and overcast and he didn’t show up until the fifth race. He came to my window, wearing a cream sweater and smiling. “You okay today?” he asked. “Where you want to go tonight?” “Look,” I began, and his smile disappeared, replaced by the look of someone who’s just been caught doing something illegal. “We…I…” I stumbled, trying to find some clear way to say the few simple things that needed to be said. Finally, I managed to tell him that we needed to meet in a public place. No cars, no shopping center. He looked crestfallen, much like when I had proposed a lunch date.

“No, it’s just…” I tried to explain that he was a customer and that it’s a big step for a teller to trust anyone, to talk to someone without the windows between us and an armed security guard three feet away. But every time I started a sentence he made these creepy little shushing noises. “Never mind,” he said, holding up a hand. “When you want to go out?” I tried again. Shush shush shush. Finally, I gave up. “Look, I’m not sure that…” He was instantly cold. “You do not want to go out today.” It wasn’t a question. And then: “Okay. Bye.” And he was gone.

I felt awful. I was a tease and he wasted a thousand dollars on me. I couldn’t even go out for a single drink. I moped through the next few races, wondering if I had made the wrong decision. Then Sal, the machine guy, appeared at my window. Salvatore, a big, good-natured Italian, has been a constant source of good humor in the bay. He asked me what was wrong and I started to explain the whole thing. I was barely two sentences into it when he started shaking his head.

“No.” he said. “No. You do not go out with him. He only wants one thing.” I was a little alarmed. Yeah, Laszlo’s a guy, but I had been sure he wasn’t expecting me to put out right then and there. Sal disagreed. “Look, we’re friends, right?” he asked. I nodded. “And when we talk, I’m looking you in the eye. But when you turn around, I’m looking down. I’m looking other places.” Gee, thanks Sal. He continued. “All the men in the world have one thing on their minds. They just have different ways of trying to get to it.” I tried to tell him that Laszlo seemed nice, that he seemed relatively harmless. Sal shook his head. “He wants to go downstate with you.” I looked at him blankly. He wanted to take me to Belmont? Sal rolled his eyes, gesturing emphatically. “He wants to get in your pants.”

That night I called an old high school friend and made plans to meet at our favorite bar. My friend is a sweet, sensitive type, and I was hoping he’d give me a little reassurance about his sex. I walked up to the pub and my heart nearly stopped. Laszlo was sitting at a table outside the bar. He was with a few people and he stared directly at me. I don’t know how horrified I looked but his expression was nothing short of cold. I stumbled into the bar and grabbed my friend, whispering dramatically, “This man who was pursuing me is sitting outside right now.” We debated sneaking out the back. We wound up at a booth and I told him the whole story while glancing back at the door, mildly panicking.

Laszlo didn’t come inside. Maybe he hated me but if he still had any desire to make something happen, he could have come in and bought me a drink. But we were in a crowded pub, not a car in the middle of the woods. I decided that maybe Sal was right. It was never about talking and it certainly wasn’t about taking a walk around the mall. Laszlo didn’t come back to my window the next day. Who knows if I’ll see him again.

Another customer asked me out a few days ago. Gap in his teeth, potbelly. He’s nice enough, and a fluent English speaker. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound sincerely regretful. “I just had a bad experience with a customer a few days ago…” His eyes widened. “I understand. I have seven sisters. Just thought I’d ask. I’m one of the nice guys.” I’m sure he is one of the nice guys. But there is a physical barrier between the customers and the tellers, and I think it needs to stay that way. I’m not going to go downstate with any of them.

“A racetrack is a place where windows clean people.” -Danny Thomas

Note: I apologize for the long delay in updating. A few weeks ago I suffered a personal tragedy; unsurprisingly, it’s taken up a lot of my physical and emotional energy. I’m not prepared to write anything meaningful about it yet, but I didn’t want to go any longer without posting. Instead, I’ll write about the other thing that’s been taking up a lot of my time: the start of my sixth season as a pari-mutuel clerk at the Saratoga Race Course. I’m sure I’ll write about the track at least a few more times, so I thought I’d start with a primer for readers who don’t know about my secret summer life.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I was desperate for work. I had spent nearly two years as a professional sweater folder, conning anyone who could hold a pen into opening a GAP charge card. I was done with the GAP, but nobody else wanted me: the economy was bad and I would leave for college in two months. My mother saw an ad in the paper for jobs at the Saratoga Race Course, a place that had been a source of seasonal irritation for my entire life. The population of our small city triples every August, packed with transplanted trainers and grooms and, noisiest and most numerous, tourists. Overdressed women in elaborate hats, men uniformed in polo shirts, khaki shorts, and dock shoes. Friends’ families would rent out their houses and leave town; we’d stay and grumble about the traffic and the jacked up prices. I’d been to the track a couple of times, but save the horse-drawn carriages that clomped past our house every evening, I had never given horses a second thought.

But I really was desperate for work, so I went to a New York Racing Association hiring event in early July, meager resume in hand. I was trying to get a job as an usher, or working the admissions booth. But they told me the only jobs left were pari-mutuel clerks – the bet takers – and security guards. The latter was definitely out, and I was skeptical about the former. I didn’t have a lot of experience with cash, and it sounded intense: I would be responsible for all the money I handled, with any losses coming out of my pocket. A few weeks later I would learn this first-hand, a $200 mistake leaving me with a frightfully small paycheck. $200 was dwarfed by horror stories in the bays: $8,000 stolen from a woman while she was in the restroom, or the flirty woman ten windows down from my own who didn’t hit the total button and wound up fired, owing the track thousands. Potential financial disasters didn’t even cross my mind when they called to offer me the job; I was just happy to be employed.

The Saturday before opening day, I joined dozens of other trainees in a big, dusty barn with two long rows of betting machines. I’ve met a fair number of tellers – exclusively men – with long gambling histories, guys who took jobs at the track to help curb their addictions. These men came to training with a thorough knowledge of horse betting, but for most of us, the terminology was a foreign language to be mastered. There’s win, of course, and second and third are place and show, respectively. There’s the exacta, when you pick the first and second place finishers in a single race. The trifecta, infinitely harder to hit, adds the third place horse. There’s the beloved daily double – the winners of two consecutive races – and the nearly impossible pick 6, where picking winners in six consecutive races is like picking a winning lottery ticket. You take these terms and add thousands of dollars – plus the noise, the heat, the crowds, and a near-desperate bid for tips – and you have the daily life of a pari-mutuel clerk. It’s not particularly glamorous, but it’s not your average summer job either. 

There’s no surefire way to pick a winning horse. Professional handicappers take a thousand things into account, from a horse’s ancestry to precise turf conditions. Some people bet on jockeys, or trainers, or the horse’s stable or owner. Twenty minutes before each race, the horses are brought to the paddock for a public viewing. I’ve had customers who could pick a winner based on the look of a horse – his legs, or the way he carries himself. A lot of people bet on odds alone, waiting until just before the race for the final numbers. They rush the windows and slap hundreds down in the seconds before the starting bell. Some people just pick names. It’s as good a method as any, really. And some people, mostly women, pick their lucky numbers. If you had put down $2 on the numbers 5, 9, 13, and 10 in today’s final race, you’d be $159,373 richer. There’s no real secret to winning, as far as I can tell. That’s why they call it gambling: there are too many factors to be sure of anything, and luck is the biggest factor of all.

I’ve already done a lot of writing about the Saratoga Race Course; some of it will probably make it onto this blog in the coming months. It’s easy to explain how betting works, or to describe my customers, as ridiculous as many of them are. But it’s hard to do the atmosphere any justice in a few paragraphs. There’s a dixieland band on one side of the park and a jazz combo on the other. There’s the announcer’s steady, booming voice and the collective chatter of thousands of bettors. It smells like cigar smoke, spilled beer, fried chicken, fried dough, and just a hint of horses. There’s the park itself, where a new coat of white paint is a consistent substitute for a thorough cleaning, where New Yorkers in faded muscle shirts stand next to Kentucky horse owners in straw boaters and white seersucker suits. And the money – cash everywhere, in stacks and bill folds, thrown away carelessly and, occasionally, won back by a nose. The cheers during the race are deafening: everyone seems to have their life savings on the line.

As horse racing is fades from the national consciousness, the Saratoga Race Course actively promotes an air of manufactured nostalgia. It stands in a weird sort of contrast with the remnants of a culture that will never be revived. “I’ve been coming here for a hundred years,” a little old man told me the other day. He smiled as he handed me a few faded bills. “Well actually, I’ve been coming here since 1935.” It was close enough. I feel like I’ve been working there for a hundred years, but it’s really only been six. I’ve watched the daily attendance steadily decline, the direct result of rising gas prices and a sign of the sport’s decreasing popularity. Many of my regular customers seem vaguely dissatisfied with the way things have been going, like gambling is a chore rather than a pastime. But they keep coming, betting, and, luckily, tipping.

For me, it’s been an opposite progression: what began as a summer job – a stressful chore – has become a source of fascination and, strangely enough, inspiration. For the past few years I’ve firmly declared that each season would be my last, but I don’t really see the necessity anymore. The work is interesting and the money is decent. And the people – the people really are something. The slick-talking Southerners, the red-faced Irish Bostonians, the Italians with half their shirt buttons undone, a dozen chains resting on thick chest hair. A lot of guys call me things like ‘sweetheart’ and ‘doll.’ A few have called me ‘toots.’ There are men who have asked for my hand in marriage; there are men who have asked me to take off my top. Some of my coworkers are just as ridiculous as the people on the other side of the windows, like the woman who sat next to me for an entire season a couple years ago. She was missing a few teeth and she would grin and shout, “Tip me, you bastards!” until customers hastily shoved money in her direction. I could fill a book with stories about these people. Maybe I will. 

“‘Wall·E’ can’t help but send out a powerful and even frightening environmental message. Though G-rated, its dystopian vision of what the perils of consumer excess have in store for the planet is unnerving without trying too hard, bringing to mind the old truism that Walt Disney and his company (Pixar’s parent) have scared more people than Alfred Hitchcock.”       -Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Note: Minimal spoilers in this post – not much beyond your standard movie review. But really, you should go out and see “Wall·E” immediately!

There was a group of snarky children sitting behind me in the movie theater the other day. We had come straight from happy hour to “Wall·E,” and I wasn’t in the mood to listen to sullen kids shouting, “Lame!” during the previews. “Wouldn’t it be weird if you grew up watching so much computer animation?” my coworker whispered as we suffered through the fifth trailer for a sub-par movie about talking animals. I thought that if the children behind us were any indication, we’d have incredibly high standards for animated films. Nothing would dazzle us; the bigger and flashier, the better. They whispered loudly through the charming short film that preceded the main feature. But as the screen darkened with the first expanse of outer space and the strains of “Hello, Dolly!,” (“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers”) the kids finally fell silent. 

The opening sequence of Pixar’s newest animated blockbuster is one of the darkest things I’ve ever seen in a film, children’s or otherwise. The cheery “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” the happy jaunt around the galaxy – it all comes crashing down in about ninety seconds. Literally, even, as we descend to Earth and the music fades away. We see a world that has been decimated and abandoned, filled with skyscrapers made of garbage and covered with a thick haze of toxic dust. When you listen to director Andrew Stanton’s happy pitch – “What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?” - and see clips of the adorable Wall·E hitting himself in the eye with a paddle ball, it all sounds great, like a classic Disney movie. But we quickly learn that 700 years earlier, Earth was driven into the ground under the control of a single mega-corporation, Buy n Large. The remaining inhabitants fled on a “five year cruise” through space that stretched on for centuries. As the camera pans across crumbling highways and enormous scrap heaps, we meet Wall·E, dutifully compacting trash. It’s a bleak introduction, and it left me near tears: it hit too close to home.

People my age – in their mid-twenties or so – began watching movies during what many now consider to be a renaissance in Disney animation, stretching from “The Little Mermaid” to (arguably) “Mulan.” The impact of these films has been pervasive and long-lasting. A few years ago I took a course called “Film Music” (that unfortunately had very little to do with either of those words). The final project was open-ended, so my group took on Disney’s surprisingly complex musical cues, focusing on “Aladdin” (lots of obvious racial/musical connections) and “Beauty and the Beast” (which required a deeper understanding of music, like listening for recurring thematic material). At the start of our presentation we asked for a show of hands to find out who hadn’t seen these films. It was a diverse group of 100 students, with a fair number of foreigners and a huge range of cinematic tastes. Not a single hand went up. Disney had gotten to us all. 

There’s a Facebook group with over 120,000 members called “Disney Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations About Love.” The group is for “the young of heart,” the creators write, “who believe that swapping your voice and family for a pair of legs is a good deal.” They list a dozen instantly recognizable Disney plot-lines that, out of context, sound absolutely absurd. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I think it’s also an acknowledgment of the lasting impact of the films of our childhood. I love “The Little Mermaid” – I used to watch it every weekend with a bowl of oatmeal – but isn’t the message a tad superficial? Catch his eye with your feminine wiles and seashell bra? Even Disney movies that impart brutal truths (nice guys – and hunchbacks – finish last) are lighthearted and nicely packaged.

Pixar, though owned by Disney, is a different story entirely. Their screenwriters and directors are clever and when they deliver a message, it’s usually sensible and rarely overbearing. In “The Incredibles,” rewarding mediocrity is discouraged, countering the “everyone is special” mantra on which my generation was raised. The same themes are echoed in “Ratatouille” – anyone can become a cook, but not everyone can cook. But these films focus on a child’s development; “Wall·E” is about our collective future. In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich’s “Wall·E for President” is a beautiful assessment of the power of this movie, the lessons that children may be taking from it, and the lessons grown-ups – particularly our presidential candidates – need to take from it.

Climate change, consumer excesses, the necessity to reuse, renew, and recycle: these are not the newest ideas around. But they’ve only recently become accepted fact in children’s movies – and not without a backlash from conservative pundits. I grew up with Disney’s mixed messages: it’s okay for girls to love books, but they’ll be virtual outcasts, forced to flee town and live with bitter, hairy men. All of your problems will be solved if you’re charming, attractive, and manage to marry royalty. A child raised on “Wall·E ” will have a moral compass that’s tuned to our impending environmental disaster. But it will be decades before they’ll be able to make policies and steer corporations; for that matter, it will be decades before most of us can, too. Our fate is in the hands of people raised on a distinctly unmodern Disney, all helpless damsels and strapping princes. Look at the results. “Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel,” Frank Rich writes, “and you’ll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?” Grown-ups need “Wall·E” more than children do. You can see it for the cost of two gallons of gas, so get out to the movies – before it’s too late.

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.” -O. Henry

The other night I dreamt that San Francisco was on fire, and as I watched a jumbled version of the city’s skyline burn to the ground, the Transamerica Building, that iconic white pyramid, fell like a tree with one swift motion, destroying everything in its path. I woke up tense and confused, and I had trouble sorting out reality from what was one of the most terrifying dreams that I can remember. Half of Northern California is on fire right now; this map shows the dozens of major blazes that currently ring San Francisco, Sacramento, and work their way up to the Oregon border. A state spokeswoman said that there are more than 1,000 individual fires burning, and Bush declared a federal state of emergency at the request of the governor. It’s been hazy here for the past week, and local health officials are urging people to limit their time outdoors.

In recent mornings, I’ve stepped outside and smelled fresh wood smoke. It took me a few days to put it together with the fires – now I know I’m smelling the remnants of an environmental disaster a hundred miles away. I can’t help but find it comforting; it reminds me of fall in upstate New York and New England. I missed that last fall living in Scotland; instead, Edinburgh has the metallic tang of wet stone, the whiskey distilleries’ heavy smokiness, and a sweet, indescribable smell that I’ve never found outside of Britain. They say that smell is the most potent memory trigger, so it’s strange walking out the door and smelling my favorite season 3,000 miles away. And it’s a little bit weird these days, because my time in San Francisco is coming to an end. Pretty soon, I’ll be back with crisp leaves and wood smoke and all that. Writing this here makes it official, I suppose: in the fall, I’m moving to New York City.

Ten years ago, I was obsessed with California. I guess I never really thought beyond the abstract: it would be sunny and next to the ocean, and people would think and act differently. But my California dreams faded quickly, and I’ve spent the past decade focused on Scotland, England, New York, and Massachusetts. California came back into my periphery when I returned from Edinburgh, and except for the sunny part, I was right. The ocean is twenty minutes west of my apartment. People think and act differently. And by and large, living out here has been fine. But I feel like more of a foreigner in San Francisco than I ever did living in Edinburgh and London; the familiar makes me complacent and the differences rattle me. My decision to move to New York wasn’t rooted in these vague feelings of displacement; with a tight money situation and an even tighter job market, I need to go where the jobs are. In editorial work, New York’s the place to be.

I see San Francisco with a clearer head these days. I have nearly a month left, but if there’s any time to start to say goodbye, it’s Pride Weekend. The city’s packed with tourists: the enthusiastic, who came here for the celebration, and the bewildered, who didn’t realize what they were getting into. I’ve hopped from strangers’ house parties to Castro clubs these past few nights. On KQED this morning the anchor forecast “areas of fog” and “areas of smoke” all around the bay. But the clouds parted as the drag queens and PFLAG families made their way down Market Street, and the sun came out and caught the glitter and bubbles that burst from elaborate floats. I squeezed onto a packed N-Judah as it rattled along Duboce, hopping off in Cole Valley in search of the perfect avocado. I made my way down Haight, pushing past the regular weekend tourists and stepping over bums passed out on the sidewalk. The Haight, for once, smelled a bit like New York: stale beer, piss, cigarettes, a lot of bodies. The sun was shining on Page and I caught my landlady as she was running out the door. “I have to talk to you later,” I said, and she nodded. She knows where I’m at right now.

My father has a knack for interpreting dreams, and he thinks that watching San Francisco burn from a distance has something to do with endings and displacement, which was my initial guess, too. Just before I flew to Scotland I had a string of terrifying dreams – a parade/suicide death march, nuclear holocaust, trying to re-seal the two halves of my severed body. Maybe this is my way of worrying through change. There’s so much to love about this city, but it’s not really about any of that right now, just as it isn’t about my frustrations with the laid-back, the self-righteous, those “types” that I – and many others – use to stereotype people out here. It’s more about one chapter ending and another beginning, no matter how short or how fulfilling those chapters have been.  

As I sat writing this, the sun disappeared, replaced by overcast skies and winds that bend the trees outside my window at sixty-degree angles. The weather changes so quickly here: super sonic fog, glimpses of sun, forty degree temperature differences from one day to the next.  People compensate in different ways. Some try to match the speed of the weather, continually pushing for change, while some hunker down – half the people in this neighborhood look like they haven’t moved an inch since 1968. Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the two, or to find my place somewhere in between. I’ve seen a lot of San Francisco these past few months, but I really haven’t seen a thing. And maybe that’s exactly the point. I’m just happy to leave on good terms, moving to New York instead of away from San Francisco. I’d live here again; if the East Coast drives me into the ground (knock on wood), I’ll always have the other coast, even if I’ll never understand it. That might be part of the allure, after all.